And dont forget condi warrior. I main a GS power warrior since i started the game 3+ years ago. I went into a CM nightmare fractal run and a guy kept complaining why we have a power Warrior in the team and complained about the dps, not seeing how his elementalist couldnt even kill his trash mob in time for the Unclean to not launch his channeling move. Another one complained for my lack of dps (horay for dps meters and toxicity) because we where on t4 underground facility with toxic trail and ice elemental boss fight. Of course i cant max out my dps when 6 toxic trail mobs+ boss are chasing me. People nowadays think condi is the cure to everything. If anything condi is most situations is always worse than power because you have to maintain the stacks to deal the damage

Let’s be fair… condition damage was absolute crap for more than 3 years from GW2’s release day till HoT, doing less burst damage, less damage overall and being severly crippled by a global stack-cap that one single player could reach. That’s nothing compared the the state of the game nowadays, where power dps are just slightly worse than condition builds and it will only need a very small amount of tweaking to get the balance right.

The balance of damage seems to waver back and forth. Condi damage is higher now, to accommodate for cleanses and the fact that so much of their damage is caused by enemies sitting in their fields. Though made for PVP, these changes make it so in PVE a lot of damage can be stacked up.

Personally I still prefer power. For several reasons:

No ramp up. Power is damage instant. Against Siaxx I’ve soloed two vets on power Guardian, but can barely kill a single vet on Condi Necro even though I’m supposed to have 32k DPS.

Greater Utility. A lot of condi builds basically require every utility to be dedicated to condi damage, but power builds frequently have space to include defensive and utility options.

Ease of use. While many enemies will sit in fire fields, many enemies will not. Power builds generally tend to just launch attacks, and aside from the occasional root or field their attacks are adept at chasing running enemies.

For dungeons and fractals, I still find power to be far more useful than condi. The only time condi shines is when I’m fighting an enemy that is going to live a really long time regardless.

And dont forget condi warrior. I main a GS power warrior since i started the game 3+ years ago. I went into a CM nightmare fractal run and a guy kept complaining why we have a power Warrior in the team and complained about the dps, not seeing how his elementalist couldnt even kill his trash mob in time for the Unclean to not launch his channeling move. Another one complained for my lack of dps (horay for dps meters and toxicity) because we where on t4 underground facility with toxic trail and ice elemental boss fight. Of course i cant max out my dps when 6 toxic trail mobs+ boss are chasing me. People nowadays think condi is the cure to everything. If anything condi is most situations is always worse than power because you have to maintain the stacks to deal the damage

I also find it rude to complain about suboptimal composition in fractals, especially if the group did not have requirements in LFG. In this case, if you are going to complain about a power PS, just ask up front and leave if there is one. I agree with you there.
However, condi damage is lately certainly not always worse than power, even in non-optimized settings. I recently started running a dps meter to improve myself (and occasionally to make a fool out of unjustified complainers). I noted that in fights where there is a lot of downtime between damage windows (usually when your group is not doing well), condi often outperforms because you can use some of your most powerful skills, then go do whatever else you need to do while the damage keeps ticking (run away, rez downed etc). When I have to make up for my groups mistakes with my power ele, my damage drops drastically, while with my condi PS the drop is smaller. In such groups, I usually note condi users have higher dps than power users (especially reapers, if all else fails they just soak up the damage they can’t dodge and let their condi’s tick away while kiting, try doing that on a power spec).

The balance of damage seems to waver back and forth. Condi damage is higher now, to accommodate for cleanses and the fact that so much of their damage is caused by enemies sitting in their fields. Though made for PVP, these changes make it so in PVE a lot of damage can be stacked up.

Personally I still prefer power. For several reasons:

No ramp up. Power is damage instant. Against Siaxx I’ve soloed two vets on power Guardian, but can barely kill a single vet on Condi Necro even though I’m supposed to have 32k DPS.

Greater Utility. A lot of condi builds basically require every utility to be dedicated to condi damage, but power builds frequently have space to include defensive and utility options.

Ease of use. While many enemies will sit in fire fields, many enemies will not. Power builds generally tend to just launch attacks, and aside from the occasional root or field their attacks are adept at chasing running enemies.

For dungeons and fractals, I still find power to be far more useful than condi. The only time condi shines is when I’m fighting an enemy that is going to live a really long time regardless.

Depends.Chilled to the bone is quite useful on harder levels because you got a lot of enemies and some have quite a bit of life.This isn’t too good if you have more than 5 because necro cannot spread more than 5 condies with epi, but epi is very useful for an example in the mech boss in underground facility due to how many adds there are.Whenever you get tons of adds i’l cast epi after spreading some condies to help kill adds faster, and it works great.Only way i might be able to do good aoe is if i use chilled to the bone or maybe staff for having area effects.

While condi is at a nice place now. I think some Power Builds should be buffed. cough Power Reaper cough.

And on some classes I hope that the new Elite Specs will help them with Power Specs because they need a Power Spec. Like Warriors ( Berserker wasn’t meant to be good as a Power Spec ). And I know that for Warriors we need to wait for another expac to hope for a Power Spec